[miguelmurca]

While I agree that it's very questionable that Nature would invite someone to write an obituary (or what have you) and then reject it, I fail to see what's so controversial about the text being overly technical. I work in Physics, and "[...] locus of solutions of sets of polynomial equations by combining the algebraic properties of the rings of polynomials with the geometric properties of this locus, known as a variety" is still an incredibly tough sentence to parse on the first pass. I cannot imagine how it would read for someone who is either unfamiliar (or only passingly familiar) with, for example, the concept of a ring; "algebraic properties of a ring of polynomials"? This just seems like a case of https://xkcd.com/2501/ , with a hint of arrogance in thinking everyone working in STEM must be as comfortable with abstract concepts of mathematics as mathematicians are.

[melagonster]

this is unfortunately, author keep talk about this is useful in phylogeny, but biologists who work on phylogeny is not popular in the group of biologists who frequently publishing articles on Nature.

[dullcrisp]

Just curious if you removed the words “rings of” would you have the same objections?